AbstractThere must have been a supercontinent, as we will show in Part 4 on Continental Drift. One or more asteroids (or small planet-like bodies) must have come unusually close to Earth periodically to produce megatsunamis by tidal action. The megatsunamis sorted and deposited nearly all of Earth's sedimentary strata in six megasequences (partially sheet-eroded) on about 75% of the supercontinent in a geologically short timespan. These occurred before orogenesis and continental drift. Many of the smaller asteroids impacted on Earth. The largest impact split the supercontinent, making the continents and initiating orogeny.

A major geological observation is that most sedimentary strata are fairly horizontal & conforming, mostly sorted into one or two kinds of sediment in each stratum.(i)

1. Gradual erosion & deposition (GED) cannot form horizontal sedimentary strata, but can only form sloped alluvial & delta fans.(1)_a. Turbulent floods can sort and deposit horizontal strata, as found at the Mt. St. Helens volcanic site in the 1980s and the Colorado Bijou Creek flood site in 1965.(1a) <<_____b. The larger a flood is, the larger is the area over which it deposits strata._c. Most sedimentary strata cover very large areas of continents or of a former supercontinent.(1c) <<_____d. This requires a continent- or supercontinent-wide flood or floods.

2. GED cannot sort sediments into different broad horizontal beds that show little to no signs of erosion between strata.(2) <<_____a. GED can only produce sloped strata on lake or sea floors or banks over relatively small areas.(2a) <<____._b. There cannot have been thousands of years of gradual erosion depositing only one kind of sediment, such as sand, in a shallow inland sea, then thousands of years depositing only another kind of sediment, such as clay, over the sand, and then more millennia depositing just lime or growing shells etc forming limestone._c. That is because there are no large upstream sources of such pure materials and no signs of such sources from the past._d. The lack of erosion between conforming strata is further evidence that the strata were sorted and deposited by floodwaters that soon receded, not by GED.

3. GED cannot fill basins with strata that conform with the shape of the basin walls & floor._a. Conforming strata occur mostly in horizontal beds and formerly horizontal beds, but also in curved forms, mainly in basins and mountain ranges.(3a) <<_____b. GED can only form sloped fan and floor strata.(2a)_c. But most basins have contoured/conforming strata.(3b) <<____

4. GED cannot bury delicate or large organisms or preserve them as fossils._a. Local turbulent floods can bury large organisms in small areas, but the burial does not keep out bacteria & small organisms that decompose the remains.(5a) <<_____b. Only great overburden pressure or heat can prevent decomposition and allow fossilization.(5b) <<_____c. A turbulent flood cannot preserve delicate fossils._d. Delicate fossils required gradual burial over minutes to days, followed by increasing overburden.(5d) <<_____e. Examples of delicate fossils are tracks, burrows, feeding traces, sea lilies, jellyfish & fishes.

5. Catastrophic flooding can provide conditions for lithification better than GED can.(5) <<_____a. Lime is one of the most common cementing agents and degassing of ocean water would have made CO2 available to form limestone and other carbonates.(5a) <<_____b. Silica is also a common cementing agent and would have been more available from precipitation and turbulent oceans.(5b) <<_____c. Iron oxide would also have been available in the same ways to help cement very hard sandstones etc.(5c) <<_____d. Clay is self cementing.(5d) <<_____e. Heat and pressure are important conditions for some lithification, which were provided under catastrophic conditions of impacts, volcanism and deep deposits of sediments.(5e) <<____

6. 25 basins from around the Mediterranean to eastern China and a few in the Americas apparently contain the entire geologic column.(6) <<_____a. Some basins seem to have formed as impact craters.(6a) <<_____b. Basins would have filled in during the 6 megatsunamis, with sediments conforming largely to basin contours as proven in experiments.(6b) <<_____c. If GED occurred and frequent tremors or tides or something caused the sediments to spread out across the floor of a basin, the sediments should have gone to the bottom as flat layers, instead of as conforming to the basin shapes.(6c) <<_____d. Some of the sediments on higher ground washed off by sheet erosion as megatsunami tides receded, leaving many continental areas without some or many strata.(6d) <<_____e. 25% of continent surfaces have no sedimentary strata: i.e. N & E Canada - Greenland - Scandinavia and E South America - Southern Africa - E India - W & N Australia - Antarctica.(6e) <<_____f. Either megatsunamis didn't reach those locations, or sheet erosion washed all of the sediments there into the oceans.

7. What could cause major flooding of a continent or supercontinent?_a. Precipitation flooding would be insufficient: if the atmosphere were much larger than now and it held a large percent of water vapor, if something caused most of the water vapor to precipitate, it would likely only raise sea level a few meters.(6a) <<_____b. Natural dam break flooding is insufficient: the Missoula flood is the largest one known and it only produced a small amount of strata.(6b) <<_____c. Sea level rise is improbable from glacial melting and would also be insufficient and not turbulent enough.(6c) <<_____d. Normal tsunamis, caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, or small impacts, are too small to flood whole continents.(6d) <<_____e. But megatsunamis could do the job.(6e)

8. What could cause megatsunamis?_a. Large impacts in the ocean could, or a close approach of an asteroid could also, by tidal effect._b. Sedimentary strata are divided into six megasequences with disconformities between them.(7b) <<_____c. The disconformities were apparently caused by minor erosion on the upper surface of each lower megasequence by rain over short periods of time._d. Thus there must have been six major ocean impacts every few weeks or months apart, or there must have been six close approaches of one or more asteroids, weeks or months apart._e. It seems more probable that an asteroid on a temporary elliptical orbit around the Earth would cause repeating tsunamis._f. Calculations show that dust and gases in space ejected during impacts would cause an elliptical orbit to circularize within decades.(7f) <<_____g. An asteroid the size of the Moon would raise tides 2.5 km high, if it were ____ km from Earth at its perigee.(7g) <<____

9. Megatsunamis meet all of the requirements for a source of Earth's geologic column._a. The tide from an asteroid's close approach to Earth would start to rise gradually, stirring up and raining down light sediment on delicate organisms, traces and ripple marks etc for a few hours._b. Due to loss of much atmosphere, CO2 would degas in the oceans, forming lime.(8b) <<_____c. As the asteroid approached perigee the tides would reach maximum velocity and great amounts of clay, silt and sand from the ocean floor and continental shelf would flow over and deposit on large areas of continents or the supercontinent.(8c) <<_____d. The sediments would separate largely according to grain size, forming horizontal or contoured beds of strata.(8d) <<_____e. Many organisms would be buried and the overburden would increase to many meters thick._f. As the asteroid moved away and the tide receded, water would drain from the sediments, gradually removing buoyancy of sediments around entombed organisms, thus allowing them to gradually compress.(8f) <<____See Taylor re Ohio sharks<<_g. Lime from the ocean waters would help cement and lithify the sediments.(8g) <<_____h. Each return of the asteroid to and past perigee would have formed another megasequence of strata.

10. Calculations. John Baumgardner calculated how large megatsunamis would have been in order to deposit the geologic column.(10) <<_____a. They would have been about 2.5 km high.(10a) <<_____b. Each one would have deposited about .4 km of sediments to make a megasequence of strata, so six of them would have deposited an average of 1.8 km after sheet-eroding some of it away.(10b) <<_____c. They could have occurred a few weeks or months apart over a few months' or years' time.(10c) <<_____d. The flooding would have occurred for a few days during each orbital cycle.(10d) <<_____e. The rest of the time the floods would have receded before the next cycle repeated_f. To produce waves 2.5 km high, a body the size of the Moon would have been ____ km from Earth, center to center.(10f) <<_____g. A smaller body would have come closer; a larger body would have come less close.

(11) <<____<Dating in Part 2>_(11a) Sedimentation Rate & Orbital Cycles(Argument:) The Cretaceous Carlile shale consists of sands and shales. Fourier analysis of the Niobrara laminations reveals that they vary in thickness according to the periodicities of the earth's long-term orbital cycles (Fischer, 1993, p. 263-295).

A:

_(11b) Multi-Year-Old Organisms Fossilized

--(11b1) Oncolite Algae Growth(Argument:) There are also oncolites, an algal growth on shells after the animals die which took time to grow (Wardlaw and Reinson, 1971, p. 1762) . An excellent example of an oncolite is shown in figure 58 of Dean and Fouch (1983, p. 123) . It says: "Cross section of an oncolite developed around a gastropod-shell nucleus from Ore Lake, Michigan. Concentric layering is the result of annual couplets of porous and dense laminae.)

A:

--(11b2) Multi-Year-Old Coccolith Growth(Argument:) The Greenhorn limestone is made mostly of coccoliths, small skeletal remains approximately 3-5 micrometers in diameter about 40 ft thick, 16 ledge-forming, burrowed limestone beds separated by thin shales. The coccoliths had to grow in the water, then die and fall to the bottom; then organisms had to burrow into the sediment; then when coccoliths were not as productive, shale was deposited, separating the limestone beds, all requiring still water.

_(11d) Dolomite Overheating(Argument:) 1300 feet of Bighorn Dolomite can not be Great Flood deposits because each gram of carbonate gives off about 1207 kilocalories per mole (Whittier et al, 1992, p. 576) . To deposit these beds in one year requires that the energy emitted by each meter squared would be 278 times that received by the sun.

--(11f2) Too Many Crinoids(Argument:) The Mississippian Madison group largely consists of dead crinoid parts. (Clark and Stearn, 1960, pp. 86-88) : The upper Mission Canyon formation or the Livingstone formation (of Alberta) is a massive limestone formation composed of sand-sized particles of calcium carbonate, fragments of crinoid plates, and shells broken by the waves. The Madison sea must have been shallow, and the waves and currents strong, to break the shells and plates of the animals when they died. The sorting of the calcite grains and the cross-bedding are additional evidence of waves and currents at work. The Livingstone limestone may be calculated to represent at least 10,000 cubic miles of broken crinoid plates, enough crinoids to cover the entire earth to a depth of 3 inches, but only a small part of a vast Mississippian crinoid bed that almost does cover the world (Morton, 1984, p. 26-27), U.S., Canada, England, Belgium, European Russia, Egypt, Libya, central Asia, and Australia.

A:

_(11g) Non-Flood Sorting of Sediments & Fossils

--(11g1) The geologic column is not sorted by ecological zones. The Silurian Interlake, Devonian Prairie, Pennsylvanian Minnelusa and Jurassic Morisson formations are continental deposits. Oceanic deposits sandwich these beds. The ocean came and went many times.

A:

--(11g2) The Pierre shale has marine reptile bones concentrated in the Sharon Springs member, not sorted as Morris would assume by ecological zonation.

A:

--(11g3) The geologic column is not divided by hydrodynamic sorting.

A:

--(11g4) Fossil mammals are not found with the earliest dinosaurs & no primates are found until the Ft. Union formation or that no full dinosaur skeletons are found in the Tertiary section, implies strongly that the column was not the result of a single cataclysm. Worldwide, no whales are found with the large Devonian fish. If the column was an ecological burial pattern, then whales and porpoises should be buried with the fish.

A:

--(11g5) The Paleozoic corals belong to one of three groups - only one of which is found in Mesozoic rocks; the other two became extinct at the end of the Paleozoic. The four-sided corals are only found in the Paleozoic. Modern corals of the 6-sided or 8-sided kind are not found until the Triassic.

A:

--(11g6) Permian pollen is found in the salt; modern pollen is not found (Wilgus and Holser, 1984, p. 765,766) .

--(11i1) The Opeche shale in the center of the basin, at its deepest part, is 300 feet of salt covering 188,400 square kilometers.

A: __[How fast could brine dry out between tsunamis? Or could it dry out under a load of salty limestone?]

--(11i2) The Silurian Interlake formation consists of carbonates, anhydrite, salt, with minor amounts of sand & throughout this deposit are also burrows and mudcracks from drying out of the layers (Lobue, 1983, p. 36,37) .

A: __[If each megatsunami came a few weeks apart, would it be enough time to dry out & form mudcracks, anhydrite, salt etc?]

--(11i3) Anhydrite is an evaporitic mineral not compatible with a global flood. The next Devonian bed is the Prairie Evaporite. It consists of dolomite, salt, gypsum, anhydrite and potash. These are generally considered evaporitic and thus incompatible with deposition during a worldwide flood (Gerhard, Anderson and Fischer, 1990, p. 515) .

A: __[Were there heat sources during the cataclysm & enough time between tsunamis for significant evaporation?]

--(11i4) There is also salt cementation with salt deposited in the fractures and crevices in the rock. Halite plugged burrows are also found.

A: __[Could the source of salt be like the brine lake under the Gulf of Mexico carried by tsunamis?]

--(11i5) The Triassic Spearfish formation contains the Pine Salt Bed, some gypsum and highly oxidized sands and shales, found in modern arid environments, gypsum being an evaporitic mineral (Wilmarth, 1938, p. 2037) . There are conglomerates in which the Mississippian rocks were deposited, hardened, then eroded and fragments deposited in the Spearfish redbeds. (Francis, 1956, p. 18)

A: __[How long does it take gypsum to dry out in air, or under overburden?]

--(11i6) The early oceanic sediments are covered by desert deposits of the Prairie Evaporite, Interlake, and Minnelusa formations. Oncolites found in the Interlake prove that these deposits took some time to be deposited. There are 11 separate salt beds scattered through four ages: 2 Jurassic Salt beds, 1 Permian salt bed, 7 Mississippian salt beds, and one thick Devonian salt. Half of these salt beds are up to 200 feet thick. The top Mississippian salt is 96% pure sodium chloride! Since they are sandwiched between other sediments, to explain them on the basis of a global, one-year flood, requires a mechanism by which undersaturated sea water can dump its salt. If the sea were super-saturated during the flood, then no fish would have survived.

A: __[Would these salt deposits all be from undersea brine lakes?]

--(11i7) The Minnelusa formation contains three features incompatible with the flood: dolomite with desiccation cracks; two anhydrite layers with a peculiar "chicken-wire" structure (Achauer, 1982, p. 195) ; cross-bedding identical to modern desert dunes; "chicken-wire" anhydrite only forms above 35 degree C. and near the water table (Hsu, 1972, p. 30) . This type of anhydrite is deposited in the Persian Gulf area today.

A: __[Would a few weeks time between tsunamis be enough time to produce these effects?]

--(11i8) The erosional layers and the evaporative salt requires much more time than a single year to account for the whole column.

A: __[Is that true?]

_(11j) Slow-Settling Particles

--(11j1) The Bakken formation is an organic rich shale that required tranquil, even stagnant, oxygen-poor water.

A: __[Could enough stagnant water have been available between tsunamis to produce this organic matter?]

--(11j2) The 200 feet of pure coccolith chalks of the Niobrara and the bentonite deposits also require a lot of time. A chalk particle, 2 microns in radius, takes about 80 days to fall through only 300 feet of very still water.

A:

--(11j3) Some of the smaller volcanic ash particles in the bentonites could take even longer to fall through 100 m in water than the coccoliths.__[Would chalk or ash particles settle quickly if the water were saturated with them?]

--(11j4) The Dakota formation has numerous borings, relatively pure volcanic ash layers (Lane, 1963, p. 229-256) . If the ash layers occurred during a raging flood, they would have been thoroughly mixed with other sediment.

A: __[Was the ash sealed in by the shale layer above it?]

--(11j5) The black shale with very small particle size requires quiet, tranquil waters for deposition.

A: __[JB says that is false.]

--(11j6) The Ordovician Winnipeg formation is very similar to the Deadwood "suggesting that the Deadwood Sandstone may be a source for the Winnipeg Sandstone" (Bitney, 1983, p. 1330) by local erosion rather than a world wide catastrophe.

A: __[The two sandstones are 145 ft apart vertically. Would the two basal layers have been deposited by successive tsunamis?]

_(11k) Impact Signs vs FloodThe Hell Creek formation is the last Cretaceous deposit. It has sands and shales, with dinosaurs and Cretaceous style mammals. And it contains the famous iridium anomaly from the K/T meteor impact. In 1984, the iridium in a 3 centimeter layer was about 12 nannograms / gram (ng/g) and in the other layers it was undetectable. Just below the iridium anomaly there is a ratio of 1 pollen grain to every fern spore. At the iridium anomaly, the angiosperm pollen practically disappears, the ratio being 100 fern spore to every angiosperm pollen grain, as if the angiosperm plants disappeared (Smit and Van der Kaars, 1984, p. 1177-1179) . Why would a global flood cause fern/pollen and iridium to alter in a way that would mimic an asteroid impact? (Kamo and Krogh, 1995, p. 281-284; Nichols et al., 1986, p. 714-717)

A: __[Maybe there were impacts during the floods.]

_(11l) Fossils of Slow-Growing Trees- The Fort Union formation is the first Tertiary deposit. It cannot be the flood deposit. It has standing fossilized tree stumps (Hickey, 1977, p. 10) .The Golden Valley Formation has tree trunk molds. This means that the trees had time to rot away before they were buried by the next layer, meaning that this layer took some time to be deposited. (Hickey, 1977, p. 68-72,90-92,168)

A: __[Didn't the roots break off in tsunamis?]

_(11m) Missing Sediments

--(11m1) There is no sand, or shale [in a sequence], so it is hard to see how this could be the flood deposits.

A: __[Is it because tsunamis likely came from different directions at different times during the cataclysm, picking up & dropping different materials?]

--(11m2) The Devonian Dawson Bay formation is a carbonate which shows evidence of subaerial erosion (Pound, 1988, p. 879; Dunn, 1983, p. 79,85) which can't be created under flood waters.

==2_ C14 Dating Diamonds- D: why would anyone talk about carbon dating something like a diamond? That makes NO sense. It's ONLY useful for dating things that we know were once alive. It tells us with incredible accuracy, up to 50,000 years (with current precision of measurement but it may increase with newer technology) , how long ago the living cells in a material stopped continually replenishing their C14 content, i.e. when they DIED. Based strictly on the carbon dating of formerly living things and disregarding mounds of other evidence, we know factually that there were living things walking the Earth 50,000+ years ago.

Erosion Rate & Seafloor Sediments- Re: One of the best evidence is coastal and continental erosion. At the current rates of erosion the continents would all erode completely below sea level within 20 million years and the seafloors would have deep deposits of sediment. The seafloors have very little sediment.- MS: That's completely incorrect. Erosion rates are nowhere near high enough to do that. And the seafloors are made up almost entirely of sedimentary rock, except in the tectonically-active areas where new rock is being formed by subsurface vulcanism.

Impact Overheating- An impact strong enough to move the Americas by 2000 miles in a day would have turned the planet into a glowing cinder. It wouldn't cause a "Great Flood," as there would be no water left. Or air. Or anything else, other than molten rock. It would send so much crustal material into orbit that the resulting dead rock would have a ring system. There's a good chance that the ring material would impact the moon, creating enough "drag" to slow its orbital speed to the point that it actually crashed back to Earth eventually, effectively destroying both bodies.

http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?topic=16789.msg294281#msg294281- Those who do radioactive dating don't agree with your claims. - Erosion rates don't even vaguely approach what you've claimed. - Seafloors do have deep deposits of sediment. - And an impact that could move continents would have destroyed the planet, as far as it being anything approaching something that could have life (and could have actually physically destroyed the planet, turning it into an asteroid belt) .

___BASINS SUPPORT RAPID DEPOSITIONThat is something Berthault's experiments apparently showed. When tsunamis deposit strata they separate the strata according to grain size etc. Since they are deposited simultaneously in a megasequence they form curved strata in basins. The curves of the strata nearly follow the curves of each basin surface, except that each stratum is a bit thicker at the bottom than on the sides, like this: MOLECULAR WEIGHT; PPM IN SEAWATER; MOLAR CONCENTRATIONSilicon 28.1 4 0.000142

=2) Randall Carlson reasoned that Halloween commemorates mass killings of people from meteorite impacts in ancient times when there were many larger meteors in the Taurid meteor stream. Earth crosses this stream each year in early November. Comet Encke appears to be the largest body in that stream now, although it takes hundreds of years to complete an orbit in this elliptical stream. The stream could be where a planet-like body came from that produced megatsunamis on Earth. If this body was the Moon on a former elliptical orbit, it has been determined that such an orbit can become circular within decades to centuries, when there is sufficient stationary hydrogen or dust in the vicinity. Such dust would be produced from asteroid or meteor collisions. Also, there's evidence that Earth's atmosphere was larger in the past, which could also have produced enough drag on the Moon at perigee to help circularize its orbit. We don't have enough evidence yet to decide whether the body was likely the Moon or not.

=2) Jeremy Auldaney: February 2016. http://auldaney.blogspot.com/2016_02_01_archive.htmlTrilobites in limestone are usually un-flattened in a living position, unlike the commonly flattened fossils in shale and slate.DINOSAUR DEPOSITS CONTAIN SALT FROM THE OCEAN